In The Slab Boys, all the action takes place in the morning and afternoon of a Friday in the winter of 1957. The scene is the Slab Room of Carpet Manufacturers A.F. Stobo & Co. of Paisley, a town near Glasgow, Scotland. The company was based on Stoddard's carpet factory in Elderslie near Paisley, where John Byrne himself worked both as a slab boy and later as a designer following graduation from art school. The slab room is a small, paint-spattered dungeon where the apprentice designers, Phil, Spanky, and Hector, mix and grind colours for the design department. Coping with this boring task requires them to have a strong sense of humour. The Slab Boys was premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1978. It was first performed as a Broadway production starring Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, Val Kilmer and Jackie Earle Haley, produced by Laura Shapiro Kramer and Roberta Weissman, and directed by Robert Alan Ackerman, at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City in 1983. The production received an Outer Critics Circle Award. The Slab Boys was released as a film in 1997, directed by the author. It starred Anna Massey, Tom Watson and Julie Wilson Nimmo. It cost ₤2.5 million.
Read more about this topic: The Slab Boys Trilogy
Famous quotes containing the words slab and/or boys:
“Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time,
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,
but it was only
the usual gray rock”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)